Key Point: “As he embarks on another campaign for the presidency, Trump delivered another CPAC doozy Saturday night. Trump’s lengthy address to the right-wing gathering in Maryland was filled with wildly inaccurate claims about his own presidency, Joe Biden’s presidency, foreign affairs, crime, elections and other subjects.”
CNN: “Fact check: Trump delivers wildly dishonest speech at CPAC”
By Daniel Dale
March 5, 2023
As president, Donald Trump made some of his most thoroughly dishonest speeches at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference.
As he embarks on another campaign for the presidency, Trump delivered another CPAC doozy Saturday night.
Trump’s lengthy address to the right-wing gathering in Maryland was filled with wildly inaccurate claims about his own presidency, Joe Biden’s presidency, foreign affairs, crime, elections and other subjects.
Here is a fact check of 23 of the false claims Trump made. (And that’s far from the total.)
[…]
The economy
Trump and job creation
Promising to save Americans’ jobs if he is elected again, Trump claimed, “We had the greatest job history of any president ever.”
Facts First:This is false. The US lost about 2.7 million jobs during Trump’s presidency, the worst overall jobs record for any president. The net loss was largely because of the Covid-19 pandemic, but even Trump’s pre-pandemic jobs record – about 6.7 million jobs added – was far from the greatest of any president ever. The economy added more than 11.5 million jobs in the first term of Democratic President Bill Clinton in the 1990s.
[…]
Elections
Trump and the 2020 election
Trump said people claim they want to run against him even though, he claimed, he won the 2020 election. He said, “I won the second election, OK, won it by a lot. You know, when they say, when they say Biden won, the smart people know that didn’t [happen].”
Facts First: This is Trump’s regular lie. He lost the 2020 election to Biden fair and square, 306 to 232 in the Electoral College. Biden earned more than 7 million more votes than Trump did.
Democrats and elections
Trump said Democrats are only good at “disinformation” and “cheating on elections.”
Facts First: This is nonsense. There is just no basis for a broad claim that Democrats are election cheaters. Election fraud and voter fraud are exceedingly rare in US elections, though such crimes are occasionally committed by officials and supporters of both parties. (We’ll ignore Trump’s subjective claim about “disinformation.”)
[…]
Immigration
The border wall
Trump claimed that he had kept his promise to complete a wall on the border with Mexico: “As you know, I built hundreds of miles of wall and completed that task as promised. And then I began to add even more in areas that seemed to be allowing a lot of people to come in.”
Facts First: It’s not true that Trump “completed” the border wall. According to an official “Border Wall Status” report written by US Customs and Border Protection two days after Trump left office, about 458 miles of wall had been completed under Trump – but about 280 more miles that had been identified for wall construction had not been completed.
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